Jack Straw has signalled a review of the law of privacy with the possibility of legislation to counter the growing privacy rights being created by the courts.

The Justice Secretary said last week that a select committee of MPs would be examining privacy after the ruling in the case brought last year by Max Mosley, president of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile.

Mr Straw told the Joint Committee on Human Rights: “It is my intention — and I understand this is exactly what is going to happen — that there should be a select committee of MPs to look at the law of privacy.

“The legal systems in common law countries are living systems: sometimes,” he told the committee chaired by Andrew Dismore, MP. “They require a nudge one way or the other by statute and there’s nothing wrong with that.”

He cited by way of example the legislation being enacted to deal with witness anonymity, after the House of Lords ruled that a man convicted of a double murder had received an unfair trial because the key evidence came from anonymous witnesses.

Emergency legislation was brought in to make clear the circumstances in which anonymous witnesses could be used — amid fears that hundreds of trials would collapse because the practice had become so widespread.

Mr Straw’s unreported comments came as MPs grilled him over an interview he did with the Daily Mail in which the Justice Secretary said that the Human Rights Act was being perceived as a “villain’s charter”.

But it is not only the perception that it helps criminals more than it does defendants: the Act is now seen as a screen behind which celebrities and others in the public eye can hide anything they want to keep secret.

Paul Dacre, editor of the Daily Mail, last November launched an angry attack on Mr Justice Eady, the judge in Mr Mosley’s case, accusing him of bringing in a privacy law by the back door: the judge, he said, had used the Human Rights Act against the age-old freedom of newspapers to expose moral shortcomings of people in high places.

Mr Justice Eady ruled in favour of the FIA chief in a legal action against the News of the World, after the newspaper had correctly reported that the head of world motorsport’s governing body had taken part in a sado-masochistic sex session with five prostitutes — but falsely claimed that it had had a Nazi theme.

Last July Mr Justice Eady ruled that the paper had breached Mr Mosley’s privacy, saying he could expect privacy for consensual “sexual activities [albeit unconventional]”.

Mr Dacre told the audience at the Society of Editors’ annual conference in Bristol that the judge’s “amoral” judgments, in this and other defamation and libel cases, were “inexorably and insidiously” imposing a privacy law on the press.

He memorably said that “the crooks, the liars, the cheats, the rich and corrupt are sheltering behind a law of privacy being created by an unaccountable judge”.

His point has clearly hit home — at least with Mr Straw. Lord Lester of Herne Hill, one of the Joint Committee members, asked Mr Straw where he stood on privacy: the Mail interview, Lord Lester said, gave the impression that Mr Straw would like to weaken the Human Rights Act, “so as to make it easier for the press to make unwarranted attacks on personal privacy”.

Straw did not say where he stood — other than backing the forthcoming privacy review. But he did indicate support for the Act’s critics. “Those of us keen to ensure that the legacy of the Human Rights Act continues and thrives need to be alive to that criticism — and respond to it,” he said.

“I don’t always agree with Mr Dacre, and still less he with me,” he said. “But I don’t take your view about him and his newspaper. It’s a serious newspaper and it happens to represent a large body of opinion in this country.”

“Whether you agree with it or not,” he added, “it is ridiculous not to take note and seek to respond to it.”

Jack Straw and Paul Dacre — it’s a powerful alliance. If legislation is mooted, then it will be an irony to think that Mr Justice Eady himself — when on the Calcutt committee that reported in 1990 on privacy — favoured a privacy law. The difference is that any new law would not be seeking to curb the press but to free it.

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